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Twitter.com Is Now 5X Faster (And URLs Are Shorter, Too)

Twitter’s engineering team has been hard at work behind the scenes these past few months, making Twitter.com faster and more streamlined.
Unless you’re a computer engineer, exactly how they did it might be a bit too technical (but if you’re interested you can read about it on their engineering blog), but the end result is a good one: faster load times, shorter URLs and reduced differences across browsers.

Loading Twitter.com now takes 1/5th the time it used to take – that means it’s five times faster and gets you tweeting sooner.

And Twitter’s URLs will be faster to type from now on too: they no longer feature hashbangs, or “#!”. We first overheard some Twitter engineers talking about removing hashbangs back in February, and they’ve finally implemented it.

Removing hashbangs means two things: pages load faster and the URLs look cleaner. If you visit my profile on Twitter, for example, you’ll still see the old hashbang in the URL:

But Twitter has already started eliminating the “#!”s on the permalinks to individual tweets, like this:

Dan Webb, Twitter’s Engineering Manager notes that they will be rolling out this new architecture across all of Twitter.com shortly.

The new web architecture also means that Twitter will load at roughly the same speed across all browsers, creating a more cohesive experience for users.

This update won’t affect everyone (in fact, stats from last year show that just 35% of people use Twitter.com while others use apps or third party services to access their tweets), but it’s definitely a smart move. Long load times are notorious for sending frustrated visitors bouncing away from a site, onto the next social network or popular video of the day.